This work was done in collaboration with DiRAC

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The DiRAC facility provides access to HPC resources for researchers in the particle physics, cosmology and astrophysics and nuclear physics community. At the moment all of these resources are provided through a variety of on-premises systems that are designed to meet different technical requirements of different research communities. As part of our forward technology watch, the DiRAC RSE team are currently working with Oracle to evaluate the performance of their bare-metal HPC instances with RDMA-enabled interconnects on the recently developed DiRAC application benchmarking suite. In this presentation we will give details of progress with this project, including:

We will finish with a summary of readiness of the Oracle bare metal cloud service for use for researchers currently using DiRAC facilities; provide an overview of how the user experience could be improved for researchers; and note the next steps for our work in evaluating use of cloud to provide HPC resources to support academic researchers.

Note: Since the webinar was presented the poor performance of the Grid benchmark has been understood to have been caused by issues with MPI process pinning on the system. The PDF version of the slides has been updated with the new results but the YouTube video still includes the old version.

Slides